State guide

Oklahoma Nature Guide

Oklahoma is where the eastern woodlands meet the Great Plains, a state stretched between the humid oak-hickory hills of the southeast and the dry, short-grass High Plains of the panhandle. Its signature landscapes are the Cross Timbers — a rough band of post oak and blackjack oak that early travelers found nearly impassable — and the tallgrass and mixedgrass prairies that still hold bison at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Osage County and beneath the granite domes of the Wichita Mountains. From the salt flats and Whooping Crane stopover at Salt Plains, to the prairie-chicken leks of the west, to the dark-sky mesa country at Black Mesa, the state's nature calendar runs across a continental climate of fierce summers, sudden spring storms, and open winter skies.